We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
A deviation of judgment that causes one to make inferences in an illogical fashion
Being smart doesn't mean you aren't just as vulnerable to a wide array of biases and fallacies. So learn to recognize them. And then what? In today's lesson, David McRaney, author of You Are Not So Smart, tells us how "humbling epiphanies" can be rewarding, even deeply pleasurable. He writes ...
The folks on Reddit don't have a lot of credibility these days, so we tread with caution in sharing this image, which may indeed be a fake. According to one Redditor, the picture, which is of a science quiz called "Dinosaurs: Genesis and the Gospel," was administered at a private religious ...
Republicans have been on the losing side of a lot of debates recently. In the past year or so, long-standing, deeply held GOP positions against gun control, same-sex marriage, higher taxes on the rich and humane immigration legislation have seen steep declines in the estimation of the public. And ...
What's the Latest Development? A team of German researchers asked male test subjects to look at 36 pairs of eyes -- 18 male and 18 female -- and, for each pair, to choose from one of two terms meant to describe the emotional or mental state of the person they were seeing. They found that the ...
It’s college admissions season, and with this year’s record-low admissions rates there are a lot of heartbroken high school seniors around the country who have been shut out of their top-choice campuses. The angst sometimes veers into indignation, and one Suzy Lee Weiss of Pittsburgh ...
Recent studies suggest that Americans might be the worst research subjects on the planet. As Ethan Watters put it recently, “social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins ...
Last week, I looked into evidence that Americans badly misperceive the magnitude of the wealth gap in their country: the actual distribution in the United States is much more inegalitarian than we think it is. Several readers and students have asked me why I think this is the case. How could we be ...
"We celebrities are desperate pigs" confesses Penn Jillette in his recent book Every Day is an Atheist Holiday . Jillette is referring specifically to his participation on The Celebrity Apprentice, a show that involves showbiz folks who are so desperate to stay famous that they agree to "suck up to ...
A few years ago, at mile 20 of my second marathon, I promised myself I would never again run a 26.2 mile race. I had trained impeccably, ran my first mile a little slower than goal pace, as everyone advises, and was primed to shave seven minutes off my previous time and traverse the five boroughs ...